by Belva Plain
“Davey had to take the pressure from the stockholders, don’t forget. And then there was all the trouble with Peggy. Too much pressure.”
“Lara had it too. I wish,” Pam said wistfully, “I wish I had her guts. Just plain guts. But I don’t know.… This trouble of yours was just too much for me, Eddy. It’s humiliating to have to admit it. But maybe I was just meant to be good for you in good times.”
“Maybe so.” And he thought, If the truth had to come out, it’s better for it to have come out now instead of when we’re sixty.
The short afternoon was coming to a close. Rusty clouds edged with silver fled toward the horizon, and a damp wind rose. Pam stood up.
“It’s getting cold. Come in and get ready for supper.”
“I’m still not hungry, and I have to see about getting back.”
“You have to eat, Eddy.”
“Okay. I’ll just take a little walk around first. It’s a long time since I’ve done much walking.”
And he thought, as he started off over the lawn, I suppose this is what is called a civilized parting. Well, if it was, he wondered how anyone ever bore the pains of a savage one. Then, in a return of his old practical tendency toward letting reason prevail over emotion, he reminded himself that Pam, at least, would survive very well. She was healthy, young, and rich. Yes, she would certainly survive, he thought, half in despair and half in gratitude. God, all he had ever wanted was for her to be safe! As for himself, he would manage. Somehow …
It felt good to walk, stretching his legs in long strides, feeling that he could keep on walking, if he chose, to the end of the earth and meet no barrier, no wall, no locked gate. No one was watching him. His feet crunched on gravel, then trod on grass, and, following a track, he seemed to recall that it led to a pond. At the edge of the pond all was still; even the wind had died there. Then something splashed, a frog or a fish, and the stillness surged back. He stood there, hearing the stillness.
“I loved her so,” he said aloud. And he remembered how it was said that after an amputation, the lost limb still ached.
After a while, as thick dusk fell, he walked back toward the barns and the house. A single horse was still out in the stableyard, drooping its head over the rail fence. He could barely discern the gleam of its dark, tranquil eyes. The horse whinnied softly, and Eddy went up to lay his hand on the warm head. On some impulse, then, he put his own head against the animal’s long cheek, and rested there. He had a sense of kinship, of perfect trust. It was as if the animal could feel the man’s trust, for it did not move or pull away. The innocence, Eddy thought, the innocence.
“What are you doing here?” Pam said. “I thought I heard steps on the gravel.”
He started. “Nothing much. Just talking to the horse.”
“His name is Baron. I’m boarding him temporarily. He’s won three blue ribbons, and he’s worth a fortune.”
“I wonder whether he would be happier if he knew.”
Pam gave him a queer look. “I’ve come to tell you something. I will pay. Not just Davey and Lara, but the people who lost through you. Just let me know whom you owe, and I will pay.”
He was too astonished to speak.
“But of course it will mean selling this huge place.”
“You’re really willing to do all that, Pam?”
“Yes, if you’re willing to try to forgive what I’ve done, and begin again with me. No, Eddy, hear me out,” she said, as he started to reply. “I’ve been thinking about us: I’ve been sitting upstairs thinking, maybe the way you’d think if you’d been in a terrible car smash-up and by some miracle found yourself still alive. We were never very grown up, were we? Not even grown up enough to start a family, to be responsible for kids. At least, I wasn’t. I married you because you were handsome, and we had great sex. I never really thought about you, about what drove you. If I had, maybe I could have helped you. I wouldn’t have let you make a mess of things.”
He was infinitely moved. “Don’t say that. I’ve no one to blame but myself for what I did.”
And I, he thought, I married you because you were beautiful and you had a family tree that I didn’t have and that I envied. Crazy, wasn’t it?
“I have no one to blame but myself,” he repeated.
“We had fun, didn’t we?” Her voice trembled. “And fun is fine, but that’s about all we did do with our lives.”
He could have wept. Instead he swallowed hard.
“Eddy? Do you think we can ever be what we were?”
“I don’t know. There’s so much I don’t know anymore.”
“I’m willing to try if you are.”
To be what they were? To go upstairs now and take her in his arms? A shudder went through him. No, not possible.
“If you would just stay here. Just for a while. We’ll be selling this place and there’ll be the moving, and—”
“You’ll need help, I know.”
She did not answer. She’s giving up all this because I asked her to, he was thinking. And it seemed to him that he owed her something in return. Why not stay, then, if that’s what she wanted, or needed? We’re being civilized, aren’t we? I can live amicably in my own room at the end of the hall; I can get a job here as well as anywhere, and go away again when she’s settled and I’m ready.
“I’ll stay awhile,” he said. “Just fix a room for me.”
“I understand.”
“And, Pam—no anger. No recriminations. I can’t speak for you, but I’m too tired for any more anger. I don’t want to feel anything. I don’t want to feel.”
“I understand that too.”
A gust of wind came suddenly out of the north, shaking the trees, and Eddy shivered.
“As long as I’m to stay, I’ll take the hot drink you offered me before,” he said courteously.
“Of course,” she answered with equal courtesy. “We’ll go right in.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The first person whom she saw among the little crowd that awaited her plane’s arrival at Kennedy was Preston, whose silver-white head loomed above all other heads and shoulders. He stepped back to let Melissa, who had just flown in from Paris, reach her first.
“Oh, Connie! Oh, Daddy!” Melissa said as they embraced.
The girl’s homely face was swollen with weeping. It flashed across Connie’s mind that here was the one person who had really deeply adored Martin. And this thought, this genuine pity, added to her own shock and grief, brought tears to Connie also, so that the photographers, coming forward at just that moment, were able to catch for tomorrow’s newspapers an appealing picture of the sorrowing young widow holding the hand of her seven-year-old daughter.
Preston, grasping the other hand, kissed her cheek. “You must be exhausted. I’ve made special arrangements to get you through customs first.”
“How thoughtful you are.… There’s no luggage except our little carry-ons.”
When one had so many houses and did so much traveling between them, it was only sensible to maintain a complete wardrobe in each.
“I thought you’d like to keep together in one car, so I’ve got a stretch limo waiting. Seats for six.” Preston counted: Connie and the two girls, Nanny, Connie’s secretary, and himself. “Yes, just right. Come. We’ll be out of here in no time.”
“So good of you,” she murmured, following him.
“We’re all just devastated, Connie. There are no words for it.”
In the car on the way from the airport the only desultory conversation was held by Thérèse and Nanny. When Preston, sitting across from Connie, met her glance, he turned considerately away. The bleak December day rolled past: joggers along the waterfront, choppy olive-green bay-waters, high-rise apartments, rows of uniform houses with plastic snowmen in their front yards and windblown tinsel decorations.
“My brother’s coming for the memorial service next week, but I wanted to come now,” Melissa said in a near whisper.
Connie nodded. She was thi
nking, when someone dies suddenly, people absurdly say, “Why, I was only talking to him on the phone yesterday,” or, “We were supposed to go to lunch next Tuesday,” as if the banality of these connections could make the sudden death more shocking. Yet, for the last four or five days, she had been doing the same thing herself: “I was reading to Thérèse at the very instant the plane went hurtling in pieces through the sky, and I was thinking how many hours it would take before I could phone him in New York and say how sorry I was that we had fought before he left.”
Oh, God! How sorry! Gulping, she closed her eyes. That awful fight! And then the horror. The horror. No one would ever know what those people had felt, whether they had lived for minutes as they fell five miles to earth or they had only one unspeakable instant before they died, or—
“Daddy promised me a boy doll to be brother to my Annie.” Thérèse’s voice chirped now in the silence. “He told me. Did you know?”
“Yes, yes. We’ll talk about that later,” Nanny said quickly. “Why don’t you take a little nap? Here. Put your head on my shoulder.”
She would have to ask a child psychiatrist what Thérèse should be told and how to tell it. Oh, the horror. The horror.
Such a good man, a kind man! No woman could have wanted a more devoted husband. The terribly sad thing was that she had not been anything more than fond of him, had never returned his love, not in her heart, although, thank goodness, he could have had no way of knowing that. If she had loved him fiercely, desperately, with the kind of love one read about, she would have been wanting now to die. And she was filled with guilt because she did not now want to die.… If only they had not parted in anger! If he hadn’t left in such a hurry, she would have made things up the next morning.
But she had tried to be a good wife, that much at least was undeniable. Impulsively, she reached forward for the limp hand that lay on Melissa’s lap and squeezed it, vowing, I will take care of Martin’s daughter, for she needs me; that much I can do in his memory.
In the apartment’s foyer the servants were lined up, making a phalanx of black wool, black silk, white aprons, and respectful mournful faces. Behind them the rooms all appeared to have been banked with flowers. They’re like diplomats at a dignitary’s funeral, Connie thought.
The butler took a step forward. “Madam, on behalf of us all, I want to say that our hearts ache for you. Mr. Berg was—we shall miss him.”
“Thank you, Marston.”
“Will you have tea, madam? Is there anything we may do?”
“Tea please, Marston. In the red library. You’ll stay awhile, Preston?”
“Of course. Unless you want to rest.”
“No, no, stay.”
Felice, Connie’s personal maid, took off the sable coat and Preston went with Connie into the library.
“I look a wreck,” she said, passing the Venetian mirror.
“Nothing could make you look a wreck, my dear.”
On a table next to the sofa stood Martin’s familiar cigar humidor, burled walnut with a monogrammed gold plaque on the lid. Preston followed her glance.
“You need have no worries about his affairs,” he said gently. “He left everything in perfect order. But you must know that.”
The humidor had to be taken away. Perhaps Melissa might want it. The thing, the very scent of it, made too many pictures: Martin in the hospital when Thérèse was born, Martin in the courtroom when Eddy was convicted, Martin clasping the new sapphires around her neck, Martin talking to the doctor when they flew Lara’s poor baby east, Martin … She put her face into her hands.
“Shall I leave you?” asked Preston after a while.
She raised her head. “No. I’m sorry. Please talk to me.”
He seemed to reflect. Then, “It’s curious,” he said, “a terrible irony that he had to die while rushing back to consummate a deal that was to fizzle anyway.”
“What? The P.T.C. Longwood buyout?”
Preston folded his long hands together over his crossed knees. “Ah, yes, and after two years’ work. Naturally, as soon as we heard the awful news, we arranged to postpone the closing for a week, but then, two days ago, we learned that your brother-in-law had bought back all the stock for just a trifle over what we were prepared to pay. If we had known, we’d have upped our offer.”
“That’s incredible,” murmured Connie. “How could he have managed to do it?”
“I’m sure I don’t know, but he did, and Bennett was furious. He refused to go ahead without the inclusion of the Davis Company’s patents. So the whole thing went up in smoke. And we’ve lost, I haven’t calculated yet how much in legal and accountants’ fees. Up in smoke.”
Connie restrained a smile. How on earth could Davey have come through with all that money? But she said at once, “Yes. It must be terribly disappointing for you.”
“To say the least.” Preston sighed. “Well, you can’t win them all, I guess.” There was a poignant silence. “One thing, though,” he said, just as Marston appeared with the tea tray, “I want you to know you’re not alone, Connie. I’m here to help you in every way I can. Remember that.”
Connie Berg made a stunning widow, slender in black with a single strand of eleven-millimeter pearls around her throat under the sweep of her pale hair. Mourning clothes were old-fashioned, yet for just that reason they had a kind of elegance reminiscent of Jacqueline Kennedy’s widowhood. When the weather turned warm in the second half of the year, she changed to cream color, heavy linen or thin silk. People turned to look after her when, on Nanny’s day out, she walked on Fifth Avenue with Thérèse and the three small poodles.
By the beginning of spring her telephone began to bring discreet invitations for quiet evenings. “Just a few friends at dinner, that’s all, since you are still in mourning.” From such quiet evenings came other invitations, most of which she turned down, from unattached men, some of them too young, some too old, and some just simply fortune hunters. Connie knew about fortune hunters.
Anyway, she was not interested. Still numbed by the unpredictability of death, by the daily immanence of it, which she had quite forgotten since the long-ago death of her mother, she was now feeling a need only for the protective comfort of the familiar. Lara and Eddy had of course come at once to New York and thrown their arms around her. It was then that she learned how Pam, through Eddy, had rescued the Davis Company. Her feelings on learning of it were mingled of tenderness toward her brother—how changed he was, still steadily optimistic, but with all the cocksure, boastful swagger gone!—and a confused sense of shame that it had been Martin who would have driven Davey to the wall.
“What bothers me,” said Lara, “is my memory of Martin’s last visit to our house. It didn’t end with the most friendly feelings, and I’m sorry.”
There was no way for Connie to answer that, since her own last memory of Martin was what it was. And for a while the three were silent in the red library, where a newly enlarged portrait of Martin in a baroque silver frame gazed out at them.
What a year it had been for the three, each in his own way! A year of trials and tests. It seemed to Connie now that they were merely pausing, resting as the world rests when a terrible winter seems to have passed, but there is still no certainty that another storm might not be on the way.
Drawn by this need for the familiar, she made a few impulsive trips in Martin’s plane to Ohio and Kentucky.
Davey’s plant was going full blast, but Lara worried nevertheless.
“The debt load is horrendous, Connie. To think that Davey had to borrow such a sum to save his own place! We’re making just about enough to meet the payments he promised Pam. And after that, we barely squeeze by. It doesn’t seem to make any sense.”
“I can’t believe Pam would press him, though. Not with all she owns.”
Lara shook her head. “No, no. But I don’t understand it! Ninety percent of their splendor’s gone. It’s very queer. Wait till you go there, and you’ll know what I mean. It’s alm
ost as if she’d stripped herself when she made the loan to us.”
“That’s too saintly to be real. Nobody does that. And surely not for a brother- or sister-in-law.”
“Well, wait till you see,” repeated Lara.
What Connie saw that first time was a neat white house of moderate size with no grand driveway, columns, wings, or terraces, surrounded by ten level acres of grazing grounds, stables, and riding rings. By the side of the country road above the mailbox a sign read: OSBORNE HORSE FARM, RIDING, BOARDING, SCHOOLING. Pam, familiar in boots and breeches, came out and led her around, explaining the new order of things.
“We don’t raise racers, only a few horses for show. Eddy’s turned against racing, and I see his point, because it’s just gambling, really, and cruel to the horses besides. Riding for its own sake is the true sport.”
Connie, feeling dainty and citified, hurried to keep up with Pam’s long stride. “How’s Eddy getting on in the new job?” she inquired.
“Very well. It’s only a three-member firm of accountants, no problem for him.”
Pam’s tone was flat. Connie thought she sensed a reluctance to touch on Eddy’s work. But that was probably understandable. Osborne and Company, the computers, the consoles, fax machines, row on row of young men, avid, nervous, and concentrated, bent above them, these were what Pam must be remembering.
“Quite a change,” she said sympathetically.
“Yes. Come see the house. You’ll find that quite a change too.”
Here indeed was no southern mansion, merely the usual basic rooms, along with an office decorated by framed photographs of horses. Connie recognized most of the furniture, although some pieces were too simple ever to have been in the New York home; they must have been bought to replace the gilt and marble. However, it was all very tasteful, and Connie was gratified to recognize familiar things, too, some of the finds that Eddy had discovered at auction, a few pieces of the silver that he cherished, and some paintings.
“Oh, the Winslow Homer!” she cried on entering the living room. “I always loved that so.”
